Matthew Mugmon: The education that $36,212 buys

Spring Fling is upon us.

And that amuses Agnes Bouchet-Sala.

Bouchet-Sala just finished her stay at the Divine Tracy Hotel on 36th and Chestnut streets.

She returned home to France this week after several days of studying budgets and the power of students at Penn. Her trip to Philadelphia came thanks to a $1,500 research grant from the Sorbonne in Paris.

Bouchet-Sala, 33, recently received her Ph.D. after 10 years of study at the Sorbonne last year and specializes in American education.

And before she left Penn, she gave me a crash course on higher education in France -- and a new perspective on Spring Fling, hoops at the Palestra and everything else we take for granted here as students and consumers at the University.

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Until two days ago, the name "Sorbonne" conjured up in my mind images of an academic and intellectual haven, a place that must be the home of only the most elite students and scholars in the world.

I pictured Jean-Paul Sartre leading a group of young, disillusioned intellectuals in a campus-wide discussion about the nature of the for-itself.

But more than anything else, I imagined, in my ignorant mind, a typical American college campus.

And then I found out what many of you who have studied abroad already know -- that universities in France are anything but campuses as I know them. In fact, "campus life" is essentially non-existent.

Graduate students rallying for unionization?

Members of undergraduate student government bodies mobilizing for changes to the dining plan?

Concerts by George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, Pete Yorn and De La Soul?

Visits by high-profile speakers like Harry Belafonte and Maya Angelou?

Intercollegiate sports? A state-of-the-art gymnasium?

Clubs and organizations? Fraternities and sororities?

No way.

But for a few hundred dollars a year -- about the same price as the newly-instituted "recreation" fee in next school year's undergraduate student costs -- what should Sorbonners expect?

Most of higher education in France is public. After finishing the equivalent of American high school, students take a test called the Baccalaureate, the scores of which determine whether or not a student can move on to an institute of higher education.

Perform particularly well on the Bac and earn a shot to study at Paris' elite Polytechnique or a comparable engineering school, the Normale Superior school or -- if you have enough cash -- a private business school.

Merely pass the Bac, and take a guaranteed spot at a university. But to go to the Sorbonne, you have to live in Paris, because admission to a particular university is based on nothing but region (or your ability to convince the government that because you have a relative or friend in Paris you should be considered as part of that region).

Once there, you pick a discipline (but your direction was really determined by the path you took in the final few years of high school). Then, you're assigned to classes and professors.

You can only hope that you'll get that lecture with the French equivalent of Thomas Childers. And even if you do, the French version is more likely to read dryly, head down and in monotone, a lecture from a sheet of paper than try to actively engage the class, Bouchet-Sala tells me.

And don't expect access. For the most part, professors work their eight-hour days and leave, with no sign of "office hours" and little chance for students to interact with them.

But Bouchet-Sala observed at Penn a vendor-client relationship that simply doesn't exist in the French system.

At American universities -- private or public, and not just at Penn -- we're not much more than consumers. Undergraduates expect to benefit from services that cost $36,212 -- not a few hundred.

And this doesn't just apply to our need to be entertained in class, or to our flashy, University-wide parties like Spring Fling.

We also pay to make sure that we get out of here with a decent-paying job -- not a reality in France. To be successful there requires extraordinary motivation and luck, Bouchet-Sala says. Unlike a Wharton degree, one from the Sorbonne is no ticket to a high-paying gig.

It's another matter, however, whether or not our luxuries as students -- the University-wide parties, the myriad of a cappella groups, the speakers and performers, the state-of-the-art facilities, the prestigious degrees -- stand in the way of the real reason we're here, be it to get an education or to prepare for the real world.

But the next time you stumble through the Quad, scream on Hill Field, or cheer with your friends for the basketball team at the Palestra, consider, for a moment, the experience you're paying for -- and what it could be like across the Atlantic.

Matthew Mugmon is a junior Classical Studies major from Columbia, Md., and executive editor of The Daily Pennnsylvanian .

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